And about a fortnight before she died she asked her son to come and sit down, and she gave him a name, and a phone number for a landline in Rowe’s Mill, and an instruction.
“When I’m gone, and when he’s going — not before — you ring her.”
Sam Haverty carried my phone number in his wallet for four years on his mother’s instructions.
He rang it on my sixtieth birthday because that was the date in the box, and because his father had told him the story of a promise under some bleachers, and because he had been told to wait until his father was going.
And his father was going.
The son.
He was thirty-nine and he had known about me since he was eleven.
Not the whole of it. He knew there was a woman his father had grown up with, because there was a photograph of four teenagers on a wall at his grandmother’s, and because when he asked, aged eleven, who the girl was, his father said “that’s Lornie” and then did not say anything else for the rest of the walk home.
